Family Home Theater

On October 20, 1985, I had the good fortune to interview Vincent Price for a non-profit journal of the arts that I edited at the time, an award-winning magazine called Clockwatch Review. The interview took place on a Sunday morning at Price’s suite at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, where he was in town to film a commercial. We had breakfast together while we talked, with Price, always the gentleman, pouring tea for me. He had just written a book about American art, and since he received a BA in art history from Yale in 1933, it seemed a good place to start before talking about his films. The following is an excerpt from an interview that was published in Clockwatch Review Vol. III Number 1 (1985).

How would you characterize American art? You said we’ve just begun to find an identity?

You know, in my profession, when they removed the censorship from the movies, the movies just went completely overboard in language, plot, sex, and violence . . . which is unfortunate. Because while some of the movies technically are wonderful, they are boringly realistic. And there is a kind of thing in the greatest drama—Ibsen and the realists—where there is a form which is brilliant, artistic, and yet somehow beyond life, larger than life.

It seems to me that one of our problems as American artists was that we were playing to the lowest common denominator. Television is the prime example of it, and I lump television and motion pictures and theater and everything else all in one thing. To me, art is everything. Everything that man does, as discriminated from the works of nature. The ultimate expression of man is art, and since I believe that everything man does is art, I believe in that ultimate expression of man’s doing.

Great art is communication to the few, unfortunately. It is not communication to the many. Your magazine will never have the circulation of the Enquirer [laughs]. The Enquirer is probably a perfect example, or Laverne & Shirley on television or Rambo in movies. I watched one of the Rambo-type movies last night, and it was the most puerile piece of writing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just rounds of ammunition, but no rounds of dialogue.

There had to have been times when director Gore Verbinski was tempted to give himself a little poke with a cutlass . . . or at least pinch himself to make sure it all hasn’t been just a six-year dream. After all, in 1997, if you’d have told the director of Mousehunt that he would go on to revive the Hollywood pirate movie and produce a blockbuster trilogy for Walt Disney that would spawn legions of fans and a cottage industry of movie-related merchandise, he probably would have laughed. Verbinski’s budget for Mousehunt was reportedly $38 million. The budget for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was estimated at $140 million, and that was just the beginning. Dead Man’s Chest (2006) had a budget of $225 million, and At World’s End (2007) took a whopping $300 million to produce. These were blockbusters in every sense of the word.

But Verbinski was clearly the right man for the job. He took a Disney theme-park attraction and turned it into one of cinema’s wildest and most successful rides. And he introduced Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow, an unusual pirate who marched to the beat of a different rum.

In two sessions with journalists on November 15 and 20, 2007, Verbinski answered questions in an online forum while bonus features from the DVD played on a small screen. Journalists submitted questions, then Verbinski decided which ones to answer. Different journalists participated in each session, and the rapid-fire questions and answers reflect that.

Since these group interviews, Disney has kept the franchise moving forward, with Rob Marshall directing On Stranger Tides, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg directing Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Rønning enlisted again to direct an as-yet untitled sixth film in the franchise without Johnny Depp. But Verbinski and Depp laid the groundwork, as this interview attests.

The maelstrom scene proved to be a major success, but also offered up major effects obstacles. Was there ever a moment you didn’t think it was going to work out?

Definitely. The biggest issue hit us about eight weeks prior to the release. We were suffering from a scaling issue that seemed insurmountable. The physics of a whirlpool this size overwhelmed the team at ILM. The path we were heading down was not achieving the desired results, so it all had to be reworked. The initial rendering backgrounds were used as out-of-focus plates for close-ups, which bought us time by getting 100 or so shots in the pipeline and allowed us to completely rethink and re-render the maelstrom for all of the wide shots. This is the exact opposite of how you would normally go about producing this sequence. John Knoll and the team at ILM ultimately pulled it off, but it was a real nail-biter.

Fans of the horror genre know some of the milestones. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock, wanting to prove that a good movie could be made with a small budget, adapted the novel Psycho for the big screen, arguably creating the first slasher film. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero brought zombies into everyday American life—no longer something that existed only in Transylvania or as a curse from the past. Then, in 1972, Last House on the Left featured murderers as the horror, an inhuman human element that made it all the more shocking. But another big milestone came in 1974 when Tobe Hooper created The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That film redefined the horror genre by jumping right into the deep end of the pool and creating a sense of menace from start to finish. And who can forget Leatherface? The masked, chainsaw-wielding psychopath started a new trend in horror films. After that, we’d see a succession of masked horror villains in Michael Myers (Halloween, 1978), Jason (Friday the 13^th, 1980), and Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984). The genre would never be the same.

With Dark Sky Films releasing an ultimate two-disc version of the classic 1974 film, which heavily relied on a single, hand-held camera, James Plath (then of DVD Town) talked with Hansen about his role as that memorable chainsaw horror villain, Leatherface.

Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, Hansen moved with his family to the U.S. when he was five years old. The family lived in Maine until he was 11, then moved to Texas, where Hansen completed high school and earned a degree in English and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Texas. Having participated in a few theatrical productions, Hansen heard about Tobe Hooper’s auditions and decided to try for a part. After playing the mentally disturbed killer in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—his first acting credit—he would appear in 30 more short films and features. In addition, he wrote stories and documentary scripts, among them Portrait of an Island (1990), Maine: America’s Coast (1995), and Ralph Stanley: An Eye for Wood (2015). He also wrote a memoir titled Chain Saw Confidential. Hansen died in 2015 at the age of 68.

The interview took place by phone on August 18, 2006.

Are you basking in the glow of the new release—the renewed notoriety—or have you always found yourself, because of this role, sort of notorious?

I think this movie has always remained strong because of the fan base. The great thing to me about a re-release is that the attention brings in a new fan base—people who are younger and may have heard about Chainsaw, but when Chainsaw isn’t getting a lot of attention they’re not inclined to look at it.

Jimmy Buffett once sang, “I don’t want the fame that brings confusion, where people recognize you on a plane.” You’ve certainly not had that problem

It’s been great for me.

What are people’s reactions when they find out? And how do you bring it up?

Well, it’s nice for me, because of course nobody recognizes me, and I’m pretty private. So I like the idea that it’s a separate thing. People are very surprised when they find out. Obviously, at a horror fan convention it’s different. But when I’m just on the street and I’m introduced to somebody, they’re always taken aback . . . and they really don’t know what to say. I’ve asked my friends, “PLEASE don’t tell them I was in the Chainsaw Massacre as the first thing you say about me. Surely there’s something else that’s interesting enough,” because the problem with telling them that first is that they truly don’t know what to say. They’re shocked. And I find it’s better that they find that out maybe as the second or third thing.